Songs: Margaret MacArthur
Just idling on YouTube, I was delighted to find that there's a video of Margaret MacArthur playing and singing at a concert in the 1980s. Go, watch, listen. She sings "Blow Your Horn, Hunter" (AKA "Old Bangum", "Sir Ryalas", and any of a bundle of titles--it's the one about the hero who kills a giant wild boar) and a bragging song whose title I didn't catch, and plays a tune.
I first became aware of Margaret MacArthur sometime around 2000, when I was starting to get into folk music as a thing of my own creativity, instead of just something that I did because my parents were into it. When I knew her, she was a good deal older than in this video, and her hair was entirely white and her face a little more lined, but otherwise she looked and sounded just the same: sweet, friendly, apple-cheeked, and simultaneously down-to-earth and like someone from another time. You know how you see a cool old dude or lady and think, "I want to be you when I get old!"? I'm like that about Margaret MacArthur. If we had a living tradition of bards and saga singers, they'd be like her.
On the second song and the dance tune, she's playing a harp-zither, an instrument which she found as a broken antique in an attic and fixed up. Her husband made it playable again, and then a luthier made a line of replicas and called them the MacArthur Harp. Perhaps one day I'll learn to play one; it has that bubbling, ringing tone of a harp, but it sounds pickable and strummable as a guitar. Sooner, though, I want to learn to play lap dulcimer as song accompaniment. Her dulcimer playing is gentle but powerful.
As long as I'm raving about her work, I ought to put in a plug for her recordings. She made a bundle; all of them are fun, and "Ballads Thrice Twisted", "On the Mountains High", and "An Almanac of New England Farm Songs" are pure genius. The latter is made up of (a) songs about farming and (b) songs sung by farmers. It's not overtly supernatural, and yet it evokes the supernatural world. With no narration or explanation (except in the liner notes), there'll be a song about "The Young Man Who Wouldn't Hoe Corn", and then a weird little ditty about "Oh, the ups and downs, oh, the hills and valleys, oh the bonny boy that tills the furrows", and then Margaret chanting in a child's voice:
"Come, butter, come! Come, butter, come!
Peter stands at the gate, waiting for a buttered cake!
Come, butter, come! Come, butter, come! The witch is in the cream, the witch is in the cream!
[spoken matter-of-factly:] ...To drive the witch out of the cream, put a hot horseshoe right into the churn."
Perhaps unintentionally, the recording evokes a world where the bizarre is real and unquestioned. I have a fantastical alternate New England in my mind, possibly to be made into stories someday; Margaret's voice speaks from that world.
Margaret died several years ago of one of those fluke illnesses that strike people of any age. I'm happy that I got to know her and heard her sing live. She and I even corresponded a couple of times, and I still have her longhand letters somewhere.
I first became aware of Margaret MacArthur sometime around 2000, when I was starting to get into folk music as a thing of my own creativity, instead of just something that I did because my parents were into it. When I knew her, she was a good deal older than in this video, and her hair was entirely white and her face a little more lined, but otherwise she looked and sounded just the same: sweet, friendly, apple-cheeked, and simultaneously down-to-earth and like someone from another time. You know how you see a cool old dude or lady and think, "I want to be you when I get old!"? I'm like that about Margaret MacArthur. If we had a living tradition of bards and saga singers, they'd be like her.
On the second song and the dance tune, she's playing a harp-zither, an instrument which she found as a broken antique in an attic and fixed up. Her husband made it playable again, and then a luthier made a line of replicas and called them the MacArthur Harp. Perhaps one day I'll learn to play one; it has that bubbling, ringing tone of a harp, but it sounds pickable and strummable as a guitar. Sooner, though, I want to learn to play lap dulcimer as song accompaniment. Her dulcimer playing is gentle but powerful.
As long as I'm raving about her work, I ought to put in a plug for her recordings. She made a bundle; all of them are fun, and "Ballads Thrice Twisted", "On the Mountains High", and "An Almanac of New England Farm Songs" are pure genius. The latter is made up of (a) songs about farming and (b) songs sung by farmers. It's not overtly supernatural, and yet it evokes the supernatural world. With no narration or explanation (except in the liner notes), there'll be a song about "The Young Man Who Wouldn't Hoe Corn", and then a weird little ditty about "Oh, the ups and downs, oh, the hills and valleys, oh the bonny boy that tills the furrows", and then Margaret chanting in a child's voice:
"Come, butter, come! Come, butter, come!
Peter stands at the gate, waiting for a buttered cake!
Come, butter, come! Come, butter, come! The witch is in the cream, the witch is in the cream!
[spoken matter-of-factly:] ...To drive the witch out of the cream, put a hot horseshoe right into the churn."
Perhaps unintentionally, the recording evokes a world where the bizarre is real and unquestioned. I have a fantastical alternate New England in my mind, possibly to be made into stories someday; Margaret's voice speaks from that world.
Margaret died several years ago of one of those fluke illnesses that strike people of any age. I'm happy that I got to know her and heard her sing live. She and I even corresponded a couple of times, and I still have her longhand letters somewhere.